Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 20, 1994 TAG: 9401200294
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
He's bowing out at a critical time, embarrassing the president he had agreed to serve and putting pressure on the administration to act with haste to find a new nominee. All of this because a newspaper column by a political commentator got under his skin? And he was supposed to head America's military?
Inman says there is more to it than that, that he is the victim of a new McCarthy-style character assassination by newspaper columnists and television talk shows. Specifically, he says, William Safire, a conservative columnist for The New York Times, agreed to write negative columns about the Clintons' Whitewater real-estate deal if Sen. Minority Leader Bob Dole would give Inman a nasty time in Senate confirmation hearings.
Safire, who has had run-ins with Inman in the past, characterized the allegation as "nothing short of weird," and Dole denounced it as "utter nonsense" and a "bit bizarre."
More than a bit.
It strains credulity to imagine that Safire, hardly a friend of the Clinton administration, would have to enter into any kind of pact to write about Whitewater, a subject he had addressed critically before Inman's name was put in nomination for the defense post. The admiral backed off his public assertion when it was met with Dole's denial.
The relentless, often unfair, grilling of presidential nominees over the years - from Robert Bork to Zoe Baird - has raised a legitimate concern that honorable, talented people would forgo the presumed thrill of serving in Washington to avoid the slash-and-burn media glare. But did Inman need to fear this?
The retired Navy admiral and former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency rankled some observers with the arrogant manner in which he condescended to accept Clinton's appointment. (He talked about attaining a "comfort level" with the president, as if he were interviewing Clinton on whether to take the job.) But certainly Inman was not subjected to the kind of treatment that Baird, for instance, or Lani Guinier received.
Inman was expected to take the Hill with ease, facing little fire either from Republicans, who viewed him as a strong advocate for the military budget, or Democrats, who have no desire to wound their president with friendly fire.
In a syndicated column that ran last month in The New York Times and was reprinted in this newspaper, Safire denounced Inman as Clinton's worst appointment to date. The columnist and Inman have clashed in the past, and there apparently is personal dislike on both sides. Inman was right to expect further criticism.
So what? Inman, a longtime Washington insider with a reputation for working well with the press, should understand the rough give-and-take of political discourse in the nation's capital. Critical, sometimes offensively critical, scrutiny goes with the work.
Inman may simply be weary of the battle, which begs the question of why he accepted the nomination in the first place, delaying the appointment of a new defense secretary.
Perhaps rather than working well with the media all of these years, he has worked the media well, as Safire maintained. In either case, he will not be under its microscope as the nation's defense secretary, and that apparently is for the best for him and the country.
by CNB